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Wednesday, April 20, 2005 8 - Orono Weekly Times ■ Æm I The law is an ass The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed. I'm not exactly sure which disgruntled lawyer-to-be scrawled those words on a marbled bathroom wall in the innards of Osgoode Hall in Toronto more than half a century century ago, but I think I know what he was driving at. The law, as Dickens warned us, is an ass. An idiot. Three recent cases of jurisprudence gone nuts (all, mercifully, from south of the border) illustrate the point. Case number one. Meet Daniel Provencio, aged 28, a two-time loser incarcerated in a California prison who is about to take a called third strike. Unwisely, he decides to participate in a prison uprising and is promptly shot in the head by a guard firing foam bullets. Daniel Provencio is swiftly taken to the prison hospital and, in accordance with routine penitentiary procedure, procedure, securely handcuffed to his hospital bed. He is also assigned an armed prison guard who is instructed to stand by Provencio's bed around the clock. The only factor that makes this entire procedure slightly Kafkaesque is the fact that a prison doctor has already declared Mister Provencio clinically brain dead. Aha. But he is still, dead or alive, an inmate. Therefore according to prison rules he must be shackled to the bed and guard- twenty-four hours a day. Why the armed guard nursemaid for a man who can't move a muscle? muscle? "Potentially, someone could come in and wheel him out," a prison spokesman explained. Err, okay...but why the handcuffs? "If we were to unshackle him, we'd have to consult with the prison guards union". Cost of the around-the- clock guard: $1,000 a day. Ironically,, mister Provencio resolved the dilemma by dying outright after two and a half weeks in the hospital, leaving behind just a little over $160,000 in unpaid medical medical bills. Case number two: Daryl Atkins, 27, of Yorktown, Virginia. A convicted murderer murderer who turned out to be a little . too smart for his own good. This was no mean feat, when you consider that Atkins had officially been declared mentally retarded. In fact, it was his designation of mental retardation that saved him from the electric chair. The state of Virginia has a law making it unconstitutional to execute any criminals whose IQ's register below 70. Daryl was home free with an IQ reading of 59. At least he was until he started a long and complicated series of appeals against his conviction. On a hunch, the state's legal experts had Atkins take the IQ test over again. He scored 74. A Virginia psychologist speculates that the jump in Atkins IQ could be attributable attributable to the 'mental stimulation' resulting from frequent talks with his team of lawyers. Sometime in the spring of this year, a jury will somberly convene to decide whether Daryl Atkins has become intelligent enough to be wor thy of execution by the state of Virginia. Not bizarre enough for you? Then consider the case of John Taylor, an inmate at Utah State Prison. Imagine you are standing with John Taylor in the exercise yard on a blustery January evening in 1998. It is bitterly cold, and Taylor is hunched against the wind, desperately trying to light a Marlboro cigarette. He is handcuffed and surrounded by two prison guards who wait impatiently, stamping their feet against the cold, as Taylor gets his cigarette lit and smokes it hungrily down to the filter. When Taylor is finished, he grinds out the butt with his heel, turns and re-enters the Utah State Prison. Where he is escorted to the execution shed, stood against a wall of sandbags and shot to death by a firing squad. Capital punishment in Utah is still in effect. But smoking in public buildings? That's a no-no.